It’s Hot In December?

Cam Newton and the Carolina Panthers are 13-0. Cam is red hot, he’s playing at a high level, and no one else seems to be able to cool him down or shut him down or even slow him down. But the question is, can Cam continue to be hot in December?

Winning is a factor of talent and timing, ability and agility, and competence and competiveness. And the weather. And for all those of you who know football, if you want your hometown team to win in the playoffs, you need to combine talent and timing and ability and agility and competence and competiveness in December.

What matters is to be hot in December. Decembers in the Midwest and the Northeast are usually cold and wet and windy and wintery. But not this year. Record high temperatures are being set up and down the East Coast and across the Midwest, and the usually brittle and brutal late Fall air has given way to Spring like temperatures. And the crazy, zany, weird, and whacky winter weather we’re having is throwing my fundamentalist football philosophy for a loop.

The preseason does not matter. The Eagles went 3-1 in the pre-season. Whoopteedoo. The thing is, the pre-season is in AUGUST, the hottest month of the year. So, being hot in a hot month is not the recipe for winning in the NFL. It doesn’t matter if you’re hot in the hot months. What matters is getting hot at the right time. What matters is to get hot in the cold months (or the months that are supposed to be cold). And so far, my Eagles are 2-0 in December.

What matters is how you play in the game of life regardless of the temperature or the weather. For the NFL, football in December cold and January frost is what separates the men from the boys. Watching grown men play in all kinds of weather and watching them pull themselves together during a tough game does something for us all. It strengthens our soul and supports our psyche. It ensures that we don’t settle and prompts us to play with the petal to the metal. We say, “if they can do THAT, we can do this,” whatever “this” is.

Spiritually speaking, we need to disregard the frost of February and the Indian summers of September. We need to live with passion and purpose and persistence regardless of what is going on around us. We need to be like thermostats, not thermometers. Thermometers gauge the temperature; thermostats set the temperature.